Lately I’ve been becoming more and more stressed. Not only are finals coming up, but college apps are due.

As a California resident, my dad has me only applying to four schools, all in California. However I’ve seen people applying to maybe even 15 schools. To be honest, I question how they do it.

Here at the Ojai Valley School we use Naviance, a program that allows college counselors, teachers, and students to access the same program in order to lessen confusion and stress of the application process. Faculty can easily input their letters of recommendation and student can manage all their different applications. I haven’t really used Naviance to be honest, but I’m sure that I will in the near future. I’ll let you know whether or not I find it to be useful, because you care so much.

But really, college apps aren’t just stressful because of the application itself, it’s also the idea of going away, leaving home, and finally being independent. At least for me it is. I’ve been at boarding school for five years and having as much free time as college gives you sounds rather terrifying. What do you do when you only have maybe four hours of school a day? Here we’re booked solid from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep on the weekdays and plan days in advanced what to do on the weekends. Isn’t OVS supposed to be a “college prep school?” If so, it only prepares us for the academic side, not the real side.